I am a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, where I work with Evan Thompson. I am also a philosophy instructor at Camosun College, located in Victoria, Canada.
My general research interest lies in defending the enduring relevance of the phenomenological tradition established by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to contemporary philosophy of mind. Moreover, I am interested in Husserlian phenomenology’s efforts to provide a philosophically rigorous theoretical foundation for explaining the relation between consciousness and nature, formulating the problem of consciousness, and rethinking the meaning of naturalism.
More specifically, my doctoral research centers around the phenomenology of well-being, flow states (states of absorbed, skilled, effortless, and spontaneous action), and autotelic experience (experience that is intrinsically rewarding and undergone for its own sake). My dissertation gives an account of the structure of autotelic experiences. It focuses on explicating the crucial roles played by self-consciousness, time-consciousness and norm-consciousness in constituting autotelic experience, particularly as exemplified in flow states. My overarching goal is to provide a phenomenological account of the structure of autotelic states that explicates how they contribute to well-being and self-cultivation.
In my work, I bring the resources of phenomenology to bear on specific problems left unsolved in philosophy of mind and 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science. I do this by showing how supplementing empirical, psychological accounts of cognition with a phenomenological approach brings greater clarity and precision to our understanding of the role of temporality in self-experience and cognition, the dynamic co-constitution of self and other, the tight interrelation between awareness and action in the world, and the genesis of meaning and of a responsiveness to norms in pre-reflective bodily experience.
My research at the Master’s and Doctoral levels has been funded by SSHRC (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).